Rebelle5: Favorite features and Portrait painting by Wesley Gardner

hey everybody how are you my name is wes gardner i'm a professional artist and illustrator currently working in the entertainment industry namely in uh tabletop role-playing games card games like trading card games and uh doing commercial work uh mood paintings and concept art for entertainment industries so credits include adidas uh warhammer 40 000 imaginefx magazine varya gene funk 2090 there's a whole bunch of stuff but uh today we're gonna be looking at my two favorite features in rebel five now i've used rebelle since rebel three and um one of these features has existed central bell three and one of the reasons i kind of fell in love with the software anyway but then the the next one that second one is something brand new to rebel five something that has been requested for years i think and i'm very excited about it it works exactly the way i wanted to and i can't wait to show you what it is we're gonna do a quick rundown of what those tools are and how we're going to use them and then we're going to do a narrated time lapse video of a portrait we're going to use some photo reference we'll talk about that as well but we'll take a look at kind of what these tools can do for us to make sure that our painting is expressive and emotional it has some cool colors and blends and all that fun stuff everything you want out of a good digital painting we'll try our best to put it in there but without further ado it's a pleasure to meet you all and let's get to it [Music] all right so here we are in rebel five this is the beta the second revision of the beta um but i'm yeah gonna go ahead and i'm gonna just make a 300 dpi uh canvas set up to 2480 by 3508 this is just one of the random um i think it's either a4 or a3 one of those and i just flipped it instead of going from landscape i'm going to portrait since we are going to be doing a portrait and this is the format i'm going to be using here so first i want to just change this canvas over um i really like the ca01 canvas it feels the most like let's say the canvas as you go out into the store and just grab like a value pack of canvases this is the closest i found feeling that way and i'm just going to go ahead and keep the default color i like to paint in my mid-tones and my underpaintings so we'll just kind of go that way but let me go ahead and get started so the two features that i love about uh rebel five one like i said this first one is actually a rollover um from earlier versions of rebel and that's going to be our brush modes so um here we have basically if you've never used rebel before you have your brush categories up here so your inks you know you get your pencils and your pastels markers airbrushes express oils so quick um oils they they take less computer resources but then you have oils and acrylics up here this is usually my go-to here i love the watercolors and just not great at it but we'll talk about that in my other video i'll be making for escape motions um but let's go ahead and with these you can see the different subcategories under the oil and acrylic brushes you have your dabbers which are great for dotting things like that you have your flats you have your knife so your palette knives right here and you have your rake brushes and then your rounds so i'm just gonna grab a general just a flat brush and we're going to take a look at all of these different modes so at first you have what's just called a paint mode and let me go ahead and grab a kind of a darker maybe a burnt sienna type color and then we're just on our normal um blending mode that's gonna be right over here on our first layer and i'm just gonna use that paint and go ahead and just add that in and already i like just how these brushes feel and you can see that texture in there at any point if you want to change this by the way under your layers panel you're gonna go uh show visual settings and this is where you can set your um things such as how your watercolors behave how wet do they get do they create drips or not but under oils and acrylics you can show impasto depth and the gloss for your impasto basically the raised brush bridges um and then your paper texture how much of that is going to show and then how much of the paint texture is going to overlay on that paper texture everything starts off around the five five three five but you'll notice um as i kind of come down here these settings stay the same so while these settings up here for the actual brush like the size the loading and the oiliness those change depending on what brush tip we have these won't because this is a global setting but i just wanted to show that really quick i'm going to close out of there and back to kind of what uh we were looking at let's go back we got that paintbrush we have our general paint right here very very cool the mode next to it is paint and mix so on the surface it's going to look very much the same but i don't know if this is picking up super well this is already a little bit lighter as it's kind of mixing in a little with the color uh of the canvas let me grab one of these colors or let's do something a little more drastic let's do like a green so this is paint and mix if i come over here and then kind of come within here you can start seeing that these colors start kind of influencing one another just subtly just not super much but just just enough right so if we actually change brush modes go to paint and blend which is this third mode right here if i come down do this and then we're gonna select that color again you can see it's a little more cloudy i guess in the way that it can actually blend because this is not all uh not only painting but blending while we're painting and you can even see if you zoom in you can even see the texture of the canvas retaining that darker essentially where the canvas is quote-unquote raised while these other this other green is kind of seeping through um the the recesses right there in the canvas it makes for a really dynamic look very very cool but i think my favorite feature let me go ahead and put um these colors once again right here i'm still in that paint and blend mode let's do that this fourth one i think this was introduced in rebel 4 or a later version of rebel 3 but this blend brush is great because the only thing it's going to do is blend colors in to colors so you can see that it's not if i try to paint with it nothing happens however if i go over [Music] do you see what i mean it has this beautiful drag effect and the reason why i love this so much is you can use any brush tip in the program in all four of these different modes so you can experiment and get exactly like if you get a fan brush with this blend right here you can get some incredible looks some incredible looks and it's just a click of a button which is amazing and you get the different dabber brushes you can even come down here my favorite to do with this blend is gonna be the knife the palette knife tools the palette knife tools in rebel are ridiculously good um it really feels like a palette knife and you even get that nice subtle pull up texture that you have it feels very natural very uh intuitive in the way that it works and you truly get some remarkable looks um and then of course you can change brush sizes to get excuse me get different impacts that way gorgeous um yeah i love it the fact that you can actually mix and match these different blending modes within your brushes is awesome another thing and i haven't used it a lot but we're actually going to use it in our time lapse is this dirty brush button and what that means is any pigment that is brought up is going to stay on your brush so if we get let's say we have a flat brush select this we bring this up we bring the green we're still going to have a little bit of the brown on our brush [Music] we have this [Music] we have this so now you can start seeing these marks and you see now how uh pardon me how now you have your uh browns in your greens then if we introduce let's say an orange [Music] and grabbed the brown again grabbed our green again kind of grabbed all this [Music] kind of blended these in together then if i go and make a set stroke look at all of that nice pigment color it's very subtle but you can see that brown in that orange and that green gradation then once again this works with every single brush tip you have if you want to talk about a way to make really pure beautiful smooth transitions from one value to another um this is a great way to do it and also bringing in color saturations in the the transfer from light to shadow um yeah we're going to talk a lot about these type of techniques during our portrait time lapse but i just wanted to show you truly powerful stuff here and i uh it is almost sacrilegious but i use the oil and acrylics way more than i use the watercolor i know watercolor is really what put rebel on the map but i think uh i mean that this blending the blending modes and stuff and also of course you can use the eraser as well and it's going to retain the brush mode or the brush tip shape and then use it as a eraser as well and that's where you can make some cool negative shapes um you can kind of get in there and it still uses even the transparency if you have a tablet device it's going to have that transfer rate in there as well so you can get the rake brushes um and you can even see we did some lines right there if i zoom in here you can still see a little bit of that pigment showing through from where it caught on the canvas really interesting stuff okay so that is the first thing the second thing is the thing that i think has been the most um let me just go ahead and delete that layer now we have a fresh layer layer two this has been one of the most requested features i think in maybe rebel history true color mixing so what does that mean instead of rgb color mixing additive color mixing in regards to using light and prism in order to make our colors um you know basically um additive um this is bringing in the more subtractive or traditional color mixing and the way you do that is through this button up here called pigment now something i want you to notice right now we're on our normal blending mode but if you go to pigment and select use color pigments it blocks out a blending mode and what that tells me is this algorithm is something that does not use any other mixes of blending modes this is its own arithmetic this is its own mathematical equation that it's doing um and what you're going to see is some incredibly spontaneous and vibrant colors mixing not out of nowhere but things you may not expect from a digital art suite so if i go ahead i'm going to grab that um [Music] that kind of color oh let me get a bigger brush here now i will say this does um well one you can already see the edges of my uh of the deal are quite a bit more vibrant and light but anyway um what you're going to see here is the brushes do take a little longer to put down i think there's just so many number crunching and you know maths happening behind the scenes but let's say i grab that and let's say i grab another one of those greens and kind of come here as you see this as i start mixing and going over in real time you're gonna start seeing some really interesting looks and shades come out and just beautifully done like look at that that is amazing like this this sort of effect is something i would be used to doing in other digital art suites but i would have to make three or four layers with different blending modes in order to get this type of look and here you just get it with the the stroke of your brush you know what i mean and we even have our dirty brush mode on right here we have paint and blend so we're getting like the maximum of this type of uh dynamic that you can see and like you can even see the edges and just everything is working together to make really harmonious color blends um yeah i mean see and it drags some of that out so you can mix and match now without the dirty brush um let's do that so we got this um [Music] you're still gonna get some incredibly vivid and vibrant just because the math is the same so this is like this orange that just happened because of how close we are with our kind of um warmer peach and kind of that cooler uh cooler green you get this nice orange that would not have existed otherwise in the more cut and dry uh paint deal but yeah this i mean really exciting stuff and then you want to get crazy you get that you change over your blending mode over to blend you get you a good palette knife right here let me scroll down so you guys can see that that soft hen and then you start getting some things that you would swear if you made a print of this no one could tell that you'd used digital software for it i mean just look at how smooth like some of the tail is on some of these brush strokes and how subtle they are and you kind of zoom out and zoom out and it reads really well but then whenever you zoom in and you do that kind of one inch from your nose test uh their new rendering system here really starts to shine whenever you see this stuff but yeah i could go on about this for days but let's start on our time lapse we're gonna be using a portrait from a stock photo website i will give credit to the stock photo um artist and also the stock photo website whenever we get to it i still haven't found it yet so whenever i do that we will introduce that and then we're gonna just talk about overall uh the painting and some of the techniques that you can do with these brush modes and your pigment layers so i will see you momentarily all right guys so now it's time for this time lapse this took a total of about two hours and 15 minutes and yeah it was a lot of fun doing this one this was actually over the course of four different painting sessions i have a six month old baby so he takes a lot of time and uh so kind of pausing here and there and going and fixing that so uh you know taking care of the family that type of thing but i i really enjoyed this piece so before we get too far into this i wanted to give a shout out um to the website pixels pexels.com it's a great website for some good photo reference if you want to do some studies and still live some portraits and stuff i really enjoy using their stuff it is royalty free it's great for studies and that's what i wanted to do here and this one was by a user named cotton bro so big shout out to cotton bro i love the look and the mood and the feel of this it looked like what really caught my eye is it wasn't really bombastic with the colors it used a really good modified ander zorn palette and i love the anderson palette that's primarily what i like to use traditionally whenever i do oils is the zorn palette just because you get so much um just fun technique with being able to smudge colors and make different you know warms and cools and things like that depending on what you have and you're not familiar with the zorn palette it's uh by you know got famous by uh swedish painter anders zorn and he used famously he used four main pigments um and that would be ivory black titanium white yellow ochre and there's a lot of debate on what the red was but uh cadmium red light seems to be a pretty good one basically you have two cools which is your black and your white and then you have two worms which is the yellow ochre and the cat red and you can do a lot with that and that's really what i wanted to do so one of the features that rebel 5 has is the ability to bring in more than one reference image so while i brought in the reference image from pixels um i could just you know color pick directly from that but i kind of wanted to train my eye digitally using the zorn palette so i had my version of the digital zorn palette that i brought in and basically i made my own color set so if you look on the right hand side where the color wheel usually is this is just a set of colors that i took from that zorn palette and kind of wanted to eyeball it and get something that was fairly close to what uh what the actual reference image had so and i kind of limited it i did some darks i did a lot of midtones this one was very mid-tone heavy um but it really made for some fun stuff and you'll notice that i do a sketch at first i'm not a great sketcher that's one of my achilles heels but the nice thing about rebel is it has so many different types of like pastels and charcoals and you know just pencil tips that you really can customize a brush to feel just like sketching in a sketchbook usually when i do it's using like a mechanical pencil on computer paper or something you know what i mean very i don't know like drafts mini so drawing's not my forte it's really just made to map out shapes and um kind of compare shapes against one another to map out where i need to put my paint and that's what i kind of rush into doing here i kind of block out you know the the shapes using line and then i go in on a background color layer with the pigment uh i guess blending mode um on there and then i just start going crazy i use um a lot of flat oil and acrylic um brushes on here i really like how the flat brushes feel they feel very much like using uh flats in real life the rounds i need to kind of modify a little bit for whatever reason i can't really wrap my mind around the rounds ironically but the flats just feel great just right out of the box and yeah just pushing paint around is so much fun and you can see these really subtle blends start to happen and things and the the pigment feature is just second to none man it's so cool um yeah it really feels like using oils with like liquid or gal kid medium or you know what i mean like it feels it genuinely does feel like traditional painting and what's nice is there's maybe the expectation of what should happen and with some painting apps you know your results might vary but the nice thing about rebel is it has that built-in spontaneity so i like happy accidents i i like bob ross for that reason he kind of you know preaches that but i really enjoy that process of maybe it's a stroke that you didn't need to put down or you didn't know that the colors were going to mix that way but you end up seeing it and you end up liking it and there's quite a few moments of that here in this piece and it was just fun i was just having a blast doing this and this wasn't really about getting a one-to-one perfect likeness of the uh you know of of the photo realism of the uh the the photo that's not really what this was this was more about the mood the moment i saw this picture i was like oh i could do a cool like john singer sergeant andersorn style brush study to see how i could make this evocative mood this artist like contemplating something um yeah do it loose kind of sketchy it sounds weird to say sketchy when you're talking about big dabs of paint but really you want that impressionism you want that you want people to work for their meal you know you want the viewer to be able to look at the details and you know and the goal here is for whenever you zoom in you see every single brush stroke but then you look back you zoom all the way out or whatever um or like in a museum you'd stand nine feet away and it has the appearance of being somewhat photo real like that's that's the beauty of that style and rebel's super good at doing it um the more i mess with the rebel 5 beta like i started using rebel rebel three and rebel four i fell in love with in rebel five uh just the pigment stuff you can have more than one reference image uh some of the ways they've changed the render engine um really remarkable stuff so just having a blast and it's so much fun and yeah instead of me thinking that things have to be exactly right i'm just having more fun with the process and i think the more fun you have with the process the better your result's going to be um because you're not sweating the small stuff you're just going in and you're letting it you're letting the chips fall where they may and there's something beautiful and really powerful about that uh yeah not much else to say on this one really i just did the shapes i duplicated the layer i went in on a normal blending mode and refined some of the shapes i really wanted the focal point to be the face so the face is a little bit more stoic in regards to brush work and then i actually go in with a blender and a smudge tool and and just kind of get rid of some of the harder brush marks around there because i want to show the soft curve of the cheeks and you know the way the nose goes into the kind of where the eye socket area and things like that are um it's more confident shapes but less chaotic brush work and another cool tip that you can use and you'll you'll probably notice it as this gets further and further refined is the closer i get to the focal point which is going to be her face um the the more refined the shapes become and as we get further out the more abstract and big and loose and like texturey those brush marks get and that's that does two things primarily it makes a depth of field focus almost like it's a photograph because everything that's not the focal point is out of focus i know it sounds redundant but you know what i mean like i'm not super worried about sweating the details on a part that you shouldn't have to look at anyway um but then what it also does is it allows you to lead the viewer with brush strokes like use the brush strokes as an arrow pointing to your subject like pointing where you want them to look and they will they whenever they get around to like oh maybe they look at the face for a bit and then they go off to one edge if you look at any of the edges there are marks either coming diagonally back up to the face or literally boxing you in and framing you back in to keep you engaged in in the focal point and it's just a lot of fun because you'll notice that i did some of the outskirts stuff on that background layer and then never touched it again didn't blend anything didn't add anything i just put those big fake brushstrokes down there the impasto looks really good and i left it alone i didn't smudge it i didn't do anything and uh that's just super rewarding whenever you just put the marks down and then it helps you build that confidence in your mark making and i think that goes a long way for intent and stuff but anyways i hope this was a helpful kind of a quick look at uh yeah like i said about two hours and 15 minutes of a painting over four little paint sessions and just a lot of fun and it's always a good time whenever you have a good reference image and you're going and just doing some fun loose studies you know there's no high stakes there's no clients breathing down your neck you just kind of get to enjoy yourself and learn about the process and i can see myself doing a lot of this learning uh in the process for rebel five because it just makes it that pigment stuff man oh it's so much fun in fact i might go right now and start making my other painting for my uh next time lapse video for the channel but thank you all so much and a huge thanks to escape motions for allowing me to be part of this channel um yeah it's an honor to be a featured artist and i just i love it man it's so much fun and i think you're gonna have a blast with it too but that's my time i'm wes gardner and i will see you soon peace [Applause]

Channel: Escape Motions

Views: 639

Keywords: #rebelle5 #oilsandacrylics #pigmentmixing #digitalpainting #portraitstudy

Id: fB00gLjIBdU

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021